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Originally Posted by Skybird
I wonder what the russians spend so much money - but produce only so small a handful of fighters, and tanks, as the article said. where is all the money going? They should be on their way to become an international top notch army again, instead they are prjected to decline and become a mediocre medium-size army by european standards, being outclassed by Turkey.
Something still stinks in their production and development cycle.
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1) Base costs. US$35 billion or so, even assuming the aid of a large black budget, is not exactly ample when you have a ~400,000 man army (as opposed to ~100,000 in Britain with a nominally similar sized budget), ~200,000 man Air Force and a ~150,000 Navy. Since they are moving around more these days, it is natural that they are having difficulty squeezing out money to buy many new weapons.
2) R&D: The Russian arms industry is among the broadest in the world, which means a lot of money gets sunk into research. When a European country doesn't build a RWR or whatever, they buy it from their neighboring European country. Russia develops one. This kind of thing means that for a similar investment into military-related affairs, an European country can build more than Russia, all else being equal.